SOME OBSERVATION ON LUCRETIUS
[The following lecture has been prepared by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island
University. It is in the public domain, released January 2010]
[Quotations from On the Nature of Things are taken from the translation
available here:
Lucretius]
PRELIMINARY REMARKS
Thomas Carlyle had firm opinions about modern translations of works from the
classical past: “We want what the ancients thought and said, and none of your
silly poetry” (quoted in the Preface to W. C. Green’s translation of the
Iliad), a remark which comes to mind when one surveys some of the recent
English translations of Lucretius, where (as with Homer) one finds a rich
selection of competing versions in poetry and prose. I doubt if there has ever
been a time when so many different English translations of On the Nature of
Things have been so readily available to the reader. Thus, in the spirit of
someone who has to select a single text for a class, I find myself speculating
on a question of some importance in such a situation: How should one assess the
relative merits of prose and poetry translations of this book for student
readers, both in general terms and in particular cases?
Lucretius’ poem, of course, belongs to a genre most English readers are not very
familiar with, a long poetical work on a “philosophical” or “scientific” subject
(the reason for the quotation marks will soon be apparent). We do have such
things in our traditions—Zoonomia by Erasmus Darwin (written in heroic
couplets) springs to mind as the best example—but for the most part our
philosophical and scientific works have been written in prose (to say nothing of
the fact that poems like Darwin’s are hardly read by anyone nowadays, let alone
by students). So the decision of many translators to render Lucretius in English
prose appears sensible enough on the surface: they are establishing contact with
the tradition most familiar to the reader. Who has any desire to read about
science or philosophy in verse? In the spirit of Carlyle, we might say that in
such a treatise what matters are the ideas, and the versification simply gets in
the way.
What objections could one make to such a stance? Well, the first objection might
be that Lucretius constantly reminds us that he is writing a poem, is very
insistent that the poetic form is an important part of his purpose, and is
evidently very proud of the result (even if he did not fully revise it and
prepare it for the reading public). True, he does encourage us to separate form
and content (à la Carlyle) with that image of honey smeared around the cup
containing bitter medicine, a section which we might interpret as suggesting
that for Lucretius the poetic form is merely a sweet decoration covering the
real content. Still, it might be worth remembering that the issue of the
suitability of poetry for “philosophical” works was alive and well in ancient
times and that in selecting to write poetry Lucretius is going against the
traditional suspicions of poetry in Plato and, more importantly, in Epicurus (as
Emily Gowers reminds us). So perhaps we could be losing more than a tasty but
irrelevant treat by completely ignoring and contradicting the passages where he
celebrates the poetry he is “weaving” (and, of course, reading about such lyric
ambitions in an English prose translation strikes one as rather odd).
Another possible objection is that On the Nature of Things is a
culturally important poem, a vital development in the history of Latin verse,
the key link between Ennius, the father of Latin poetry, and Virgil (somewhat
similar, perhaps, to the importance of Marlowe’s dramatic poetry in the
transformation of English blank verse before Shakespeare). This point is
naturally important to students of Latin poetry and applies only to the poem in
Latin. Hence, it is obviously not relevant to any English translation, no matter
how much classical scholars may deplore the practice of prose translations (if
they deplore it), in the same way that some students of English literature scoff
at French prose translations of Shakespeare.
Objections to the tradition of translating Lucretius into English prose become
more substantial if one pauses to explore an important question: What is this
work trying to do? What is its purpose? To reach a tentative answer to these
questions, we need to take our lead from Lucretius and follow a circuitous road.
It takes no profound reflection to realize that the main purpose of this poem is
not to present and defend in any rational manner a comprehensive scientific
argument about the nature of the world. To demonstrate this point one does not
have to assess the scientific content of the poem (more about that later) but
simply point out what is obvious enough from the start: the main point of the
work is not scientific but ethical. Lucretius wants to encourage people to live
more successfully, to experience life without the constant anxieties brought
about by their ignorance of natural causes and by their excessive dependence on
customary religious practices and traditional values. Knowledge of the
materialistic nature of things, he believes, is the most certain route to such
an improved awareness and thus to a better life. It addition it will motivate
the reader to seek out appropriate pleasures. In writing the poem he is
undertaking a task of persuasion, trying to convince the reader to follow the
advice he is offering. And that persuasion involves, not simply the prosaic
reasonableness of the scientific views he is advancing, but more importantly the
rhetorically persuasive effects of poetry. In other words, this poem is not
simply a presentation of rational ideas; it is about the emotional feelings
associated with those ideas (nowhere is this more evident than in the superb
closing section of Book 3, where the speaker addresses directly the reader’s
fear of death).
Let me (at the risk of digressing) expand on this last point, since it is key to
what I am going to be claiming about On the Nature of Things. Here is a
very famous example of the poetic expression of feeling for an idea:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”)
Now, this idea would be easy enough to render in prose,
but the entire point of the lines would be lost, because what matters here is
not the idea but the speaker’s feelings about the idea. No one would ever place
Wordsworth’s poem on a required reading list for a philosophy course, because
the idea is commonplace. And yet no one would leave this poem out of a course in
English Romantic poetry because it is, quite simply, one of the finest
expressions of feeling about an idea ever written. And that feeling emerges from
the poetic form (the sentence structure, repetition, imagery, rhythm, and so
on), from the way those features of the style help us grasp the confident and
urgent intensity of the speaker’s feelings. The passage is a fine and justly
celebrated example of Wordsworth’s amazing ability to provide in his best poetry
insight into his feelings about nature, something which transformed the
understanding of countless people, not only about nature but about themselves.
And he achieved this, not by rational persuasion but by his poetic power. One
might make similar observations about other famous poems of “ideas” (Pope’s
Essay on Man, for instance or, if we move outside English literature, the
supreme examples of Dante in the Divine Comedy and Aeschylus in the
Oresteia): their purpose is to illuminate feelings about ideas, not
rationally to argue for those ideas (in fact, from a logical perspective, their
poetic work often amounts to a rather poor rational defence of anything).
Now, this gives us the basis for a more substantial objection to prose
renditions of Lucretius. If he is, indeed, seeking, like Wordsworth, to convey
feelings about a particular understanding of the cosmos in order to persuade the
reader to share those feelings, then abandoning the poetic form in favour of
prose would seem to work against that purpose, since it means turning away from
the literary form best suited to exploring such emotions. This observation may
carry a little more weight when we reflect that the scientific content of
Lucretius’ poem has had little to no effect on the history of science (indeed it
rarely merits consideration in accounts of that history); whereas, what the poem
reveals about an attitude towards life (and science) has always had an enormous
influence among those who read his work in Latin—scientists and non-scientists
alike.
At this point a couple of questions inevitably arise. First, why cannot prose
carry out the same rhetorical effect as poetry? Why would a prose translation
automatically deny this aspect of the poem? The short answer is that such a loss
is not inevitable, for prose is capable of remarkably “poetic” effects, as
anyone who has read the sermons of John Donne or listened to those of Jeremiah
Wright can attest. One could also point out that Plato’s early Socratic
dialogues, thanks largely to their dramatic form and the characterization of
Socrates, are justly famous as prose works which communicate insight into the
delights of the philosophical life and that this aspect of these fictions is far
more important to most readers than any light they shed on complex philosophical
issues. After all, those who meet Socrates in these works retain a (usually
affectionate) memory of the man long after they have forgotten this or that
detail of his argumentative conversations. So, given these and many other
examples, I would never establish some a priori principle about what
prose can or cannot achieve.
That said, however, it does seem from the examples of prose translations of
Lucretius in English which I have read that prose generally fails to account
satisfactorily for the aspect of the work I have just mentioned. The best of
them (the Hackett edition by Martin Ferguson Smith), for all its merits as
crisp, clear English, never comes close to the sort of poetic quality needed—the
evenness in the tone and cool clarity of the diction and sentence structure keep
things calm and steady in a way well suited to a science essay or philosophical
argument, but there is little sense of emotional variety or intensity and the
pace never seems to vary (try reading aloud the famous opening to Book 2, for
example). Smith certainly avoids the dreary plod of, say, Cyril Bailey or H. A.
J. Munro, but still there’s little sense of Lucretius’ urgency or imaginative
excitement in Smith’s prose.
Part of this response may well stem from the complex question of the reader’s
expectations. People’s way of reading poetry differs from the way they read
prose (a potentially contentious point, I admit, but my assertion is based on my
own experience and my years of teaching prose and poetry to students). And
setting out to read what looks at first like a scientific treatise in the form
of a series of prose essays is inviting the reader to treat Lucretius as if she
were reading a scientific text (like Origin of Species). And to that
task the reader brings different habits and criteria than she does to something
that looks and reads like a long traditional poem. In response to this assertion
one might well ask the following: If translations of Homer have worked well
enough in prose, why cannot one say the same about Lucretius? And haven’t you
contradicted yourself with your remarks about Plato’s early Socratic dialogues?
Fair enough, I suppose. Prose editions of Homer, however, also elicit different
expectations and habits from readers than do poetic ones. In a prose version,
the epic poem becomes an epic novel or, in many cases I prefer not to think
about, a historical romance. However, even given this shift, I would be prepared
to argue that, all else being equal, much less is lost in that transformation
than in one which turns a great epic poem into what reads like a prosaic
argument (at least both prose and poetic forms of Homer preserve the details of
the story, the characters, and the speeches, and the reader is still dealing
with fiction).
There is, however, at least one compelling argument in favour of a prose
translation, an important point which helps to account for the fact the Smith
translation is still the first choice of many teachers, and that is the
questionable quality (to use the politest term available) of many of those
versions offered up as poetry. Carlyle’s remarks, after all, may not spring from
an insensitivity to poetry so much as from a disgust with the failure of his
contemporaries to provide acceptable poetic translations of the classics, for
their efforts were, by and large, fairly wretched (at least in the case of
Homer). Hence, one can make a good case that having a clear and eminently
readable prose version of Lucretius at least gives us the content in a succinct
and enjoyable manner, and that is preferable to the loose, periphrastic, inert,
and incompetent versification on display in some of the recent attempts to
render Lucretius in English verse. I would, for example, select Smith’s or
Ronald Latham’s efficient prose over Frank Copley’s or Walter Englert’s laboured
verses or A. E. Stalling’s often perky fourteeners with their emphatic forced
rhymes, or William Leonard’s hopelessly outdated and euphemistic diction. Rolfe
Humphries’ colloquialisms and odd word choices may be relatively infrequent but
their effect is catastrophic, and the tone of the translation seems totally
wrong. What one desiderates in a good deal of such versification is any sense of
emotional compression and intensity, together with an awareness that there may
be more to writing poetry than just leaving an erratic blank space to the right
of the page (as in, for example, David Slavitt’s lifeless lines or Anthony
Esoslen’s erratic, rhythmically halting verses, or the prosaic chat of C. H.
Sisson laid out to look like poetry). If Ronald Melville emerges as
significantly better than these poetic offerings, the reason may well be
that—whatever criticism one might have about this or that aspect of the style—he
avoids the idiosyncrasies of the others, so a sense of the power and seriousness
of Lucretius can manifest itself. In his text we are at least dealing with what
we can recognize and read as poetry, without constantly having to wonder about
strange rhythms, odd colloquialisms, and an inappropriate tone.
Of course, these judgments, like all assessments of poetic quality, reflect very
personal preferences. After all, few literary matters are more disputatious than
the issue of the quality of poetic translations. But if the poetry in
translation cannot catch and hold the tone and intensity of Lucretius (what one
reviewer has called the “relentless urgency” of the poem), if, that is, it fails
to deliver direct emotional insight into the speaker’s feelings, especially at
those moments when Lucretius’ poem really soars (as in the closing section of
Book 3, for example), but instead holds the reader back and forces her to wade
through awkward, inflated, and rhythmically inert or limping English, then give
me good prose every time. This is especially important when one is considering a
text for students, because bad poetry will probably reinforce any convictions
they may already have about how long poems are boring and irrelevant (especially
those from ancient times).
THE SCIENTIFIC CONTENT OF LUCRETIUS
A response to a good deal of what I have said so far will depend to a large
extent on one’s opinion of the scientific content of Lucretius’ poem. After all,
if the work contains a treasure of scientific information and argument, then one
might reasonably defend a prose version as a contribution important for its
factual and rational content (especially given the deficiencies in most poetic
alternatives). In Carlyle’s words, we would have the essential part—that is, the
denoted content—and the poetry is no great loss. If, however, the scientific
content is not the main (or the only) issue, then offering the work as a
scientific treatise in prose might seem somewhat limiting.
Now, it’s clear enough that Lucretius is, in part, writing a polemic. He is, as
it were, jumping into an energetic intellectual battle, keen to announce his
support for Epicurean science and his admiration of Epicurus and to wage war
against the opponents of those views, especially the Stoics, the forces of
organized religion, and the traditional values of politically ambitious Romans.
We have lost most of the other philosophical works he is reacting to and
borrowing from, although the diligent work of countless scholars gives us many
details of who said what and when. In the face of that lack of full contextual
documentation, we might well begin by looking directly at the poem and asking
ourselves if there is any scientific value in his contribution (much of which
is, as he admits, borrowed from others).
I say scientific value, because at this point I wish to separate the literary
and historical merits of his poem (its qualities as a poem and its value as a
historical document) from what it has to offer of value as a scientific
treatise. I also wish to stress that in trying to sort out the value of
Lucretius’ scientific contributions, we need to remember that there is an
important difference between a specific contribution to a scientific
understanding of the natural world and the effort to encourage a particular
approach to understanding nature (scientific or otherwise). The first is a
matter of reasoned argument and convincing evidence; the second is an attempt at
rhetorical persuasion (which may well involve rational argument but is not
limited to that).
On the face of it, Lucretius’ poem is something of a disappointment as a
scientific work. He is probably at his scientific best when he is refuting an
opponent (although he is not always fair to his rival’s ideas, as in the case of
Anaxagoras), when, that is, he raises key objections to the theories of those
materialists who wish to explain that all matter is produced from one or more
basic substances (fire, air, water, earth, individually or in combination). The
objections may be obvious enough, but his treatment is effective and thorough.
And his argument for the existence of atoms, for their properties, and for the
ways in which a limited number of atomic shapes can produce the variety in
materials we see all around us and also account for variations in colour, smell,
and other sensations is, although not original to him, the strongest and most
interesting scientific theory in the poem. If we measure the value of the poem
by its scientific ideas, Lucretius’ presentation of materialistic atomism is an
obvious highlight.
At this point one should acknowledge what many people find particularly
interesting in the poem: its apparent anticipation of a number of modern ideas.
These include the social contract, non-visible sources of solar heat, the water
cycle, the development of language, and (perhaps) certain aspects of sexuality
and heredity, among others. However, in the poem these are, for the most part,
not given a firm theoretical basis—that is, they are not scientifically
explained in any detail by atomic theory or anything else (other than the
velocity of falling particles in empty space)—and, as often as not the
differences between modern theories and what Lucretius offers are more
significant than the superficial similarities, so that the very notion of an
“anticipation” of modern theories is pure Whiggery (for example, in what people
see in Book 5 as an early account of natural selection). And where we can
recognize an obvious influence, that may not amount to a scientific
contribution. For example, it may well be that that classic work of modern
political sociology, Rousseau’s Second Discourse (On the Origins of
Inequality) borrows heavily and directly from Lucretius, but the
presentation in Lucretius is no more scientifically convincing than it is in
Rousseau.
Moreover, in many places, the materialistic explanations Lucretius offers are,
well, scientifically embarrassing (although almost invariably interesting). He
is particularly weak on what is often considered the high point of ancient
science, the regular motions in the cosmos (a weakness Frank Copley attributes
to the lack of interest in mathematics endemic to Epicurean science). As a
result, the treatment of solar and lunar eclipses is hopeless (an inevitable
result of the theory of perception which convinces him that the sun and the moon
are the same size as we observe them from earth). In a similar manner, his
treatment of the sun’s motion is very muddled because he does not clearly
differentiate between its daily orbit around the earth and its annual movement
around the ecliptic. He rejects the notion of attraction to the centre (i.e.,
gravity) because he confuses the entire universe (which has no centre) with
celestial systems (in his terminology, worlds) within that universe (which do
have centres). What he has to say about the celestial bodies seems to be
derived, as Cyril Bailey observes, from the general knowledge of his time (minus
the mathematics). He relies upon various winds or movements of air (air and wind
are different substances in his view, although that difference is never entirely
clear) as the cause of any complex natural phenomenon that is difficult to
explain, everything from the motion of the sun and the stars to earthquakes,
lightning, volcanic eruptions, perception of distance, and magnetism. His most
famous doctrine, that of the unpredictable swerve of the atomic particles in
their linear motion (the clinamen), the source of the atomic collisions which
result in the initial material combinations which create everything, saves us
from the determinism of the Stoics and guarantees free will in living creatures,
but it has long been dismissed as arrant speculation without scientific
credibility. The idea is offered up without evidence: in a nice piece of
circular reasoning worthy of Descartes, Lucretius introduces the swerve as the
guarantor of free will and then uses the existence of free will to demonstrate
the validity of the swerve. The poem relies heavily on observations of the
natural world as evidence (an important point we will consider later on), and is
not interested in precise measurement or experiment. The closest we get to the
latter is (perhaps) the business with the magnet repelling iron filings when a
brass container is inserted between the iron and the lodestone, a result which
should not have happened, because, as we now know and as Lucretius should (one
assumes) have observed, the behaviour of a magnet is not affected by the
interposition of a non-magnetic substance between iron and the source of the
magnetism.
Lucretius insists that our understanding of nature must
be based on reason and sense experience and we must account for phenomena with
an explanation that involves matter, void, and motion. But he often displays
little interest in whether what he offers is a plausible notion that answers the
most obvious questions one might like to ask. For example, he accounts for our
ability to look at something and assess its distance from us by the notion that
objects are always giving off material images of themselves in all directions
and that these images as they move out of from the object push air ahead of
them. This air strikes our eyes and enables us to sense instantly the
approximate distance of the object. Well, that is a rational and material
account and answers to at least part of our experience. But some obvious
questions immediately arise: If weather conditions are stormy (e.g., wind
blowing hard between us and the object) should that not affect the passage of
air and thus our senses of distance between us and the object? Why does the
object appear just as far away if we look at it through a sheet of clear flat
glass (i.e., block the air from reaching our eyes)? And so on. Again and again,
Lucretius offers a material explanation without pausing to reflect upon its
plausibility or meet any immediately obvious questions.
From the point of view of modern science, one of the most telling deficiencies
in Lucretius is his lack of interest in universally binding theoretical
explanations for natural phenomena (something which may well be linked to his
lack of interest in mathematics). Having focused on a particular perception, he
will then offer a list of alternative often very ingenious theories (e.g., for
the motion of the stars or the appearance and disappearance of the sun each
day). All those which might conceivably happen somehow in a materialistic
universe are acceptable, provided they are not contradicted by our senses, and
there is no use trying to sort out one possible theory from another. He even
expresses a certain contempt for anyone who might want to do that. Lucretius
concedes that in our world there must be only one explanation, but given that
there are countless other worlds in the universe where other explanations may be
valid, he sees little point in trying to settle on just one of the alternatives
as correct.
At this point one might well protest that such criticisms are manifestly unfair.
To measure Lucretius against the methods and purposes of modern science is to
make demands neither he nor any other ancient thinker could be expected to meet.
They did not have an agreed upon method of enquiry and their reflections on
nature had a purpose fundamentally different from the modern preoccupation with
gaining power over nature. That is very true. But I am not trying to assess the
merits of Lucretius methods, merely to point out that his poem has serious
problems if we wish to see in it a valuable contribution to specific
developments in the methodology and achievements of science. There is, after
all, a reason why, as I have already mentioned, Lucretius, who was read by
almost every well-educated European for five centuries (at least) is almost
always totally absent from histories of science.
This last historical point perhaps needs some elaboration. There is no doubt
that, in directing people’s attention to a thoroughgoing and secular materialism
based on atoms, Lucretius’ poem exerted a significant influence on those
interested in natural philosophy, so that, as Monte Johnson and Catherine Wilson
state, “the Lucretian conception of nature . . . was a major driving force in
the Scientific Revolution experienced in Western Europe beginning in the early
seventeenth century.” But that influence, important as it was in shifting
attention away from traditional ways of carrying out investigations of the
natural world, did not contribute directly to defining the purposes and methods
of the new science. Indeed, as Johnson and Wilson point out, the new scientific
developments in many respects contradicted the major purpose of Lucretius’
endorsement of ancient atomism.
Here I should also mention the spirited defence of Lucretius’ scientific merits
made recently by Michel Serres, in an extraordinary book which argues that, far
from being a justly forgotten footnote in the development of science, Lucretius’
poem is, in fact, where it all begins: it is, simply put, the beginning of
modern physics (hence the title of his study of Lucretius, The Birth of
Physics). I have no wish to evaluate that claim here (even if I were
competent to do so), except to say that the vision of Lucretian science Serres
is advancing (with the help of a strong injection of Archemidean mathematics)
appears considerably at odds with many features of the modern activity we call
science.
However, Serres’ book is a vitally important contribution to an understanding of
Lucretius (and I am very indebted to his arguments) because he quite correctly
places most of his emphasis on the single most important point about On the
Nature of Things: the poem is not primarily about this or that explanation
of natural phenomena, nor does it have much to offer by way of outlining a
detailed method of scientific enquiry (other than repeatedly emphasizing sense
experience and reason); it is instead, first and foremost, an eloquent plea for
a certain way of orienting oneself to nature and, beyond that, to one’s own
life. And this aspect of the poem has exerted an enormous and continuing impact
on European intellectual life, not only among natural scientists but among
educated people of every imaginable description, from Catholic priests to
materialistic atheists, from nuclear physicists to Romantic poets and democratic
politicians.
Let me amplify this point a little before moving on to consider just what that
orientation involves. What I am claiming about On the Nature of Things
is that the merit of the poem emerges from the eloquence of its observations and
recommendations rather than from the facts or explanations it offers. Just as
Wordsworth’s poetry fundamentally changed many people’s attitude to nature
without offering any particularly useful or detailed “theory” of nature, so
Lucretius contributed fundamentally to influencing attitudes about the natural
world and human conduct, without in the process giving us any remarkably new
discoveries or methods. In other words, On the Nature of Things is not
a scientific treatise (merely or primarily) but an amazing and influential poem,
which succeeds because of its poetic insight and power. To overlook that or
brush it aside in the interests of isolating its scientific content is to negate
the very reason the work has played such an important role in our historical
development and is still a wonderful read.
These observations about the scientific value of Lucretius’ poem could also be
applied to its philosophical value as well. Hence, tributes to the philosophical
content need to be assessed carefully. George Santayana, for example, claims
that Lucretius offers us “one complete system of philosophy, materialism in
natural science, humanism in ethics. Such was the gist of all Greek philosophy
before Socrates. . . . Such is the gist also of what may be called the
philosophy of the Renaissance, the reassertion of science and liberty in the
modern world. . . .” Given what I have said above about the scientific
contributions of Lucretius, my response to such a claim will be obvious enough.
I have no quarrel with that word “gist” (the limitations it suggests are
appropriate), but the notion that Lucretius offers us a “complete system of
philosophy” seems, to put it mildly, stretching things considerably (there is,
after all, an important difference between applauding and paying tribute to such
a system or to the “gist” of such a system and actually offering us the
philosophical details).
For Lucretius is about as important to the history of philosophy as he is to the
history of science. Yes, he is a justly celebrated proselytizer for a certain
way of looking at the world and of conducting oneself in it: in fact, he is the
most famous, eloquent, long-lasting, and influential literary champion of
Epicurean ideas and a crucial voice in the spread of classical humanism. But one
would hardly consider Lucretius worth looking at closely if one’s main concern
was to analyze the complex details of an attempt rationally to justify the
philosophical system he is endorsing.
LUCRETIUS’ VIEW OF NATURE
What, then, is Lucretius’ view of nature? What lies at the heart of his impulse
to teach us how to view the natural world? And how does that impulse shape what
he has to say? Here we come to the heart of the matter, the “vision” which
inspired him and which he offers to us.
It is clear enough that Lucretius’ major purpose is, as I said before, ethical.
He wants people to live happier, more successful lives. His Epicurean sympathies
naturally enough see the route to such better lives in the relief of pain,
especially pain of mental anxieties fostered by the pursuit of unworthy and
self-defeating aims (money, fame, political power), by the fear of death, and by
organized religion and its doctrines. Along with release from pain, he includes
the pursuit of pleasure, but only those pleasures which do not promise to bring
with them an increase of pain (that is why random promiscuous sex is to be
preferred to romantic entanglements and why the pleasures of contemplation, so
richly celebrated at the start of Book 2, are the finest of all). Such avoidance
of pain and enjoyment of pleasure, especially in contemplation, are best
achieved by understanding the material basis of the world, thus acquiring
knowledge which will provide a much healthier perspective on what truly matters
(particularly knowledge of our own mortal physicality). Hence, his teaching does
not involve the study of nature for its own sake or as a means of spiritual
discipline or as a method for increasing our power over natural phenomena: its
major purpose is utilitarian—it will make our lives happier.
The most obvious and famous result of this attitude is Lucretius’ extreme
hostility to traditional religion—which, in his view, is neither reasonable or
natural and is the source of endless anxiety and cruelty. And responses to his
poem often begin and end with that. Voltaire, as one might expect,
enthusiastically approved the most famous line in the poem attacking traditional
religion: “That shows how much/ religion can turn mankind to evil” (1.134), and
the energy of that endorsement is matched by any number of people who turned
away from Lucretius in horror for this irreligious stance. In many places, the
materialistic explanations for certain phenomena (particularly for the famous
series of seventeen proofs of the mortality of the soul in Book 3) are obviously
designed to neutralize the effect of organized religion’s most potent weapon:
the fear of death and the afterlife. Just as Thomas Hobbes (in Leviathan)
realizes that to convince people to accept his theory he has to demolish
traditional ways of interpreting scripture in order to ease fears of the life
hereafter, so Lucretius has to demolish the immortality of the soul, which is
the basis for all sorts of stories and practices, in order to ease similar fears
deliberately fostered by traditional belief.
Lucretius does, of course, believe in the gods, but his vision of these entities
does not admit that they have any significant interaction with human beings
other than providing them images of their divine but material persons (by a
process he promises to explain but never does) so that human beings may engage
in the only appropriate form of worship, the contemplation of divine forms. He
explicitly rejects the notion that gods created the world (Why on earth would
they interrupt their tranquil existence to do that? And where would they get the
idea?), as well as the ever-popular view that the design of nature reflects
benevolent purposes in the divine powers that created it (If so, why are there
so many obvious flaws in nature?). It is interesting to observe how some later
thinkers influenced by Lucretius who wish to adopt his materialistic stance but
who need to take the sting out of any accusations of impiety simply make those
gods (or God) the source of natural laws (e.g., the Deists) or else, like Kant
(in Universal History of Nature), invoke Lucretius in order to distance
themselves from him by summoning the design argument to their assistance.
Lucretius’ vision of nature, however, has other important targets. He wishes to
counter skeptics who claim that there is no certain knowledge of anything, let
alone of nature, as well as the determinists, for whom nature operates by
permanently fixed universal laws of cause and effect. The former group he
dismisses easily (the self-referential paradox reveals that they are standing on
their heads), and in response to the latter he offers a vision of a natural
world which cannot be subjected to deterministic rules. The result is totally
fascinating, even if (or perhaps because) it is so different from our mainstream
scientific traditions. And when we explore this aspect of the work, the poem
takes on an extraordinary life of its own as a vision of great imaginative
power.
The first and most obvious point about Lucretius’ view of nature is its
extraordinary dynamism. Everything is always moving all the time. Objects may be
apparently at rest, but all their particles are always in restless motion,
matter is streaming to and from them all the time, the air is full of particles
in motion (sunlight, images, smells, noises, and so on) and its composition is
always changing, corporeal stuff enters and leaves the cosmos continuously,
below the earth all matter is constantly shifting, and everywhere around us the
battle between heat and water continues without pause. The earth is constantly
leaning over and threatening to collapse (like a precarious, ill-constructed
building), then righting itself, and then moving once again, often with
cataclysmic results. No writing about nature is so dominated by verbs of motion,
change, collision, combat, creation, explosion, destruction, and dissolution.
This vision is reinforced by the way in which Lucretius spends so much time on
phenomena involving flowing liquids and constantly shifting atmospheric
conditions, those features of nature which most resist accurate prediction (to
judge from the time he spends on various subjects and the quality of his poetry
as he moves from one subject to another, he is far more interested in the
behaviour of clouds, winds, and lightning, for example, than he is in the
regular motions of the planets). Yes, he does acknowledge the repetitive
patterns, like the returning seasons and the monthly phases of the moon, but
what really fires his imagination are the sudden and unexpected phenomena, like
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, thunderbolts, rainstorms, whirlwinds,
torrential floods, and disastrous diseases).
Allied to this dynamism is the randomness of nature. At the heart of all natural
processes is the random swerve which cannot be reduced to some universal
deterministic law. And, like that swerve, nature often operates suddenly,
unpredictably, and often with enormous force. The overwhelming sense one gets is
of an intense vitalism, whose effects we can acknowledge but cannot contain,
control, or entirely foresee. The vitalism helps to produce an interesting
ambiguity in the poem, since Lucretius moves back and forth between a sense of
earth as a caring and endlessly creative mother and a sense of the world as an
inanimate stage for the survival of the fittest and for the enduring mechanical
and often violent wars between the forces of production and dissolution.
These qualities of Lucretius’ vision of nature lie at the heart of Serres’
argument that in this work we have the birth of modern physics, which, in
response to the inadequacies of classical physics, has embraced randomness and
irrational dynamism at the heart of matter. That claim, as I have mentioned,
strikes me as exaggerated, but there is no denying the characteristics of the
poem which prompt it. The vitalism is best symbolized early in the poem by
Venus, the source of the erotic energy that drives all activities in nature. And
Serres makes much of the opening picture of Venus and Mars, in which the speaker
of the poem is asking Venus to control the natural aggression of her lover in
order to bring peace to Romans. Of course, this is a plea for political harmony
at a time of growing unease, but, Serres argues, it is also an important
indication of Lucretius’ overall purpose: Lucretius wants Venus (the symbol of
his vision of nature) to rein in Mars, the aggressive, warlike spirit at the
heart of other ways of looking at nature (Serres makes the same comment about
the later reference to Hercules and his aggressive masculine exploits early in
Book 5).
The importance of this irrational vitality at the heart of nature may help to
explain one of the greatest attractions of Lucretius’ poem—the emphasis it
places on particular perceptions of single natural phenomena. Again and again,
Lucretius links the point he is making to a specific scene: a horse halfway
across a flowing river, sheep grazing in the meadow, trees rubbing in the wind,
severed limbs twitching on the ground, lions going berserk in battle, garments
hanging up beside the sea, huge dogs playing with their pups, a cow searching
for her slaughtered calf, the appearance of oars above and below the water,
stars glimmering in the heavens, a racehorse in the starting gate, the build up
of clouds before a storm, and on and on. Such experiences, the style of the poem
insists, are much more important than any explanations we might try to come up
with to account for them. Lucretius clearly does not wish to subsume the
particularity of our sense perceptions under some universal principle (hence,
all mechanical explanations which satisfy our sense experience are equally
correct). It’s as if he wants our interaction with nature to be specific, local,
individual—anything but some exemplification of a general rule. This desire, of
course, sets him at odds with the driving impetus of modern science, whose
entire endeavour is to subordinate the particular experience to the general law.
Now this last point is an important reason why the poetic quality of a
translation matters. Lucretius is often accused of being extremely pessimistic,
thanks especially to his emphatic assertions about the destruction of the world
and the eventual dissolution of everything in our cosmos (to say nothing of the
final section on the plague in Athens). In addition, his poem frequently calls
attention to the destructive effects of natural processes (earthquakes,
whirlwinds, floods, and so on) and to the mutability of everything. Yes, such
passages provide plenty of material for some gloomy reflections. But offsetting
this is the enormous delight he communicates in his pictures of the natural
world and the confident joy he expresses in thinking about it as a source of
unending activity, beauty, sublimity, and power. Like Socrates in Plato’s early
dialogues, Lucretius is urging us to have the courage to reorient our priorities
to nature and to our own lives, and (again, like Socrates) the most persuasive
means he has at his disposal is an insight into his own intense convictions and
his determined courage in the face of an unpredictable, powerful, dynamic, and
dangerous but always fascinating world.
At times one even gets the impression that Lucretius wants us to reach an
understanding of nature through our particular perceptions of natural phenomena
on a case by case basis. His materialistic atomic theory and his two guiding
principles (sense experience and reason) will give us the tools to carry out
such a task, so that we can then share the enthusiasm he feels by looking all
around us with a heightened sensitivity to the wonders of nature. Serres makes
much of the fact that Lucretius at times uses the word foedus (meaning
treaty) to describe this relationship: rather than seeking out and
imposing universal laws on our experience of nature, we should begin and end
with our perceptions and, as it were, arrive at an understanding by some mutual
negotiation with nature. Whether this qualifies as a scientific stance is, I
suppose, open to debate—it certainly flies in the face of our accepted notions
of what science is all about—but it is a call to reorient the way we look at,
comprehend, and feel about the world and about ourselves. If we need a “proof”
of the value of such a stance before signing on, we find it, not in the
scientific or philosophical arguments, but in the character of the narrator of
the poem, in the intense confidence, resolution, and delight he reveals in
contemplating this vision of the nature of things.
A COMMENT ON THE INFLUENCE OF LUCRETIUS
I have referred above to the significant impact Lucretius has had on all sorts
of developments in our culture, up to and including the present day. I have no
wish to offer a detailed or comprehensive account of that influence, even if I
had the time and expertise to do so. Still, one should, I think, at least pay
tribute to that aspect of the poem, if only by suggesting that readers
interested in the subject consult the recently published Cambridge Companion
to Lucretius, a collection of essays in which scholars well versed in the
subject offer, among other things, a fascinating glimpse of those who have paid
tribute to the shaping influence of Lucretius on them and their works.
The Latin text of Lucretius was first published as a printed book around 1473,
and the first English translation, by a “Puritan blue-stocking,” Lucy
Hutchinson, appeared in the mid 17th century (Taylor). Since the first
appearance of the Latin text in print, the list of those who have acknowledged
Lucretius as an important influence reads like a Who’s Who of Western Culture.
It includes, as one might expect, those who welcome the poet’s attacks on
organized religion and endorsement of reason and sense experience in pursuit of
a life of moderate pleasure (e.g., Voltaire, Diderot, Hume) but it also includes
pious Catholics (e. g. Gassendi), who seem to have experienced little difficulty
with the anti-religious sentiments in the poem, leading Romantic poets (e. g.,
Wordsworth, Shelley), and a slew of nineteenth-century figures (e. g., Arnold,
Tennyson, Marx, Fitzgerald, Pater, Whitman, Goethe), among many, many others.
Thomas Jefferson, it seems, owned eight copies of On the Nature of Things,
declared himself a firm disciple of Epicurus, and may have derived that phrase
“pursuit of happiness,” at least in part, from his reading of Lucretius
(Hamilton). The poem’s influence, according to Stuart Gillespie and Donald
Mackenzie, can be linked to a range of twentieth-century poets and philosophers.
So pervasive is its presence in the intellectual climate that for one critic at
least (Stuart Gillespie) Charles Darwin’s claim that he had not read Lucretius
is rather like Milton’s claiming that he had not read Genesis.
One figure in this tradition who obviously stands out is Montaigne, who was
immersed in Latin as a child and grew up with the great Latin classics as his
constant companions. Montaigne knew Lucretius backwards, quotes him more than
any other classical author, and covered his copy of Lucretius’ text with his own
annotations. Of course, there are some obvious differences between the two
thinkers, for Montaigne has a much more skeptical, ironic, and wry imagination
than Lucretius does, but for all that there is a great deal in Lucretius which
Montaigne finds to his liking, especially the brave resolve to live with the
pleasures which are possible and to turn away from the storms of political life
and religious controversies in very uncertain times, relying upon reason and
sense experience of nature as a guide. If we remember that Montaigne has
exercised a decisive influence on the education of French students for hundreds
of years, we can better appreciate how a leading modern European intellectual
like Michel Serres, who hails Montaigne as his “father,” is also an ardent
defender and brilliant interpreter of Lucretius.
LIST OF WORKS CITED
Bailey, Cyril, translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1910.
Copley, Frank O., translator. Lucretius, The Nature of Things. New
York: Norton, 1977. (Sample here)
Gowers, Emily. “Thoroughly modern Lucretius.” Times Literary Supplement,
October 1, 2008 (available here).
Englert, Walter, translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things.
Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2003. (Sample here).
Esolen, Anthony M., editor and translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of
Things. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. (Sample here)
Gillespie, Stuart and Philip Hardie, editors. The Cambridge Companion to
Lucretius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007.
Green, W. C. The Iliad of Homer with a Verse Translation. London:
Longmans, 1884.
Hamilton, Carol V. “The Surprising Origins and Meaning of the ‘Pursuit of
Happiness.” George Mason University’s History News Network 1-28-07.
Humphries, Rolfe, translator. The De Rerum Natura of Titus Lucretius Carus.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. (Sample here)
Johnson, Monte and Catherine Wilson. “Lucretius and the history of science.” In
The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius. Edited Stuart Gillespie and
Philip Hardie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 131-148.
Latham, Ronald E., translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things.
London: Penguin, 1994. (Sample here)
Leonard, William Ellery, translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things.
London: J. M. Dent, 1916. (Full text available here)
Melville, Ronald, translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. (Sample here)
Munro, H. A. J., translator and editor. T. Lucreti Cari, De Rerum Natura,
Libri Sex. Fourth Revised Edition. In Three Volumes. London: George Bell
and Sons, 1900.
Santayana, George. Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 1910.
Serres, Michel. The Birth of Physics. Translated by Jack Hawkes.
Edited, Introduced, and Annotated by David Webb. Manchester: Clinamen Press,
2000.
Sisson, C. H., translator. Lucretius, The Poem on Nature: De Rerum Natura.
New York: Routledge, 2003. (Sample here)
Slavitt, David R., translator. De Rerum Natura: The Nature of Things: A
Poetic Translation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. (Sample
here)
Smith, Martin Ferguson, translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things.
Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001 (Sample here)
Stallings, A. E., translator. The Nature of Things. London: Penguin
2009. (Sample here)
Taylor, Margaret E. Review of Cosmo Alexander Gordon. A Bibliography of
Lucretius. London: Hart-Davis, 1962. In The American Journal of
Philology, Volume 87, No. 2 (April 1966), p. 253. (Available here)